Holofcener struck the jackpot with her quirky LOVELY AND AMAZING in 2001.  Though not as much a hit as it was in the U.K. – I saw it in London at the Prince Charles though never noticed it released here in North America – it told the story of one mother and three daughters.  FRIENDS WITH MONEY, Holofcener’s latest film, again deals with four women, three of whom are comfortable with their money situation while one is not, working as a maid and surviving the meager salary as well as scrounging on free samples of all kinds of products.

3 NEEDLES.  3 stories about aids transmitted by needles.  3 narratives set in different countries – Canada, Africa and rural China.  Thom Fitzgerald’s (BEEFCAKE, WILD DOGS, THE HANGING GARDEN) latest film is an ambitious epic aiming at wringing the complacency out of the world at dealing with the unsolved health epidemic.

Bobby Dukes has been paintball champion for a record number of consecutive years until BLACKBALLED because he wiped.  Now banned for 10 years, Bobby is in the process of assembling a team together, enter the competition again and thus regain his title.  Are we excited???

The simple title of director/co-writer and actor Radu Mihaeleanu’s ambitious new film is indicative of the difficulty a human being has to undergo in order to adapt to a different culture.  LIVE AND BECOMNE begins in grand scale, with a panoramic shot of makeshift tents in the desert moving to the airlift evacuation of thousands of Falasha or Ethiopian Jews to Israel.  Part of Operation Moses, a political arrangement between the U.S. and Israel to help starving Jews, the plot gradually settles to the story of Schlomo, the black Ethiopian boy who is forced by his mother to leave her and his homeland to assume the identity of a Jew in order to survive.  The story leads to the boy’s adaptation into a French Sephardic family in Tel-Aviv, his love and marriage into a prejudiced Israeli family and finally to his education in the medical field leading him to graduate as a doctor (here performed by Mihaileanu himself) serving his fellowman back in Africa.

Hollywood finally figured out that animation makes the big buck movies.  Not only has the Academy Awards churned out a new category Oscar for Best Animated Film, but 2006 will most likely be the year in which the most animated films are released.  The last two weeks had ICE AGE 2: THE MELTDOWN top the box-office charts.  This week with Disney’s THE WILD opening, it will be the animated features that will be the top of the box-office.